ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to take a serious look at one aspect of Nicholas Rescher's brand of pragmatism, his justification of cognitive values. Rescher may be the most prolific of contemporary American philosophers with over 130 books and countless articles in print. Rescher seeks to understand the relation of humanity to the world and how, in that complex relation, one can isolate the specific activity of producing knowledge, best seen in the context of science. For Rescher, pragmatism is action oriented; it is teleological. The here-envisioned functionalistic version of pragmatism regards effective praxis as the proper arbiter of appropriate theorizing. Peirce articulates first his most fundamental maxim: "the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action". A crucial feature of Peirce's epistemology is that people need experimentally based knowledge to create more knowledge. The habit of action so important to Peirce is created through experience, in a manner very similar to Hume's habit creation.
